Erik Prince

Erik Dean Prince (6 June 1969-) was the founder and CEO of Academi, a major private military company.

Biography
Erik Dean Prince was born in Holland, Michigan on 6 June 1969, the son of industrialist Edgar D. Prince and the brother of US Republican Party politician Betsy DeVos. Prince left the US Naval Academy after three semesters, as he hated the school; he instead received a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from Hillside College in 1992. That year, he was commissioned into the US Navy, serving in the US Navy SEALs in Haiti, the Middle East, and the Balkans. While he was fighting in Yugoslavia, he began to think of a private training facility to train special forces troops, and he financed the formation of Academi as "Blackwater" in 1997 in response to the Rwandan Genocide. From 2001 to 2010, the CIA paid Blackwater $600,000,000, and Blackwater made a total of $2,000,000,000 between 1997 and 2010, performing both overt and classified operations for several clients. After the massacre of innocent civilians in Baghdad, Iraq led to increased legal pressure against Blackwater, Prince changed the company's name to "Academi" and moved to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates.